A cyclist from online delivery company Deliveroo is seen in Paris during the March 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. Photo: Reuters/Hans Lucas Pictures.

A restaurant meals delivery app in France is facing legal action after two kosher restaurant owners in the city of Strasbourg reported that at least two delivery men had refused to collect food from their premises because of their hatred of Jews.

Raphaël Nisand, a lawyer acting for the two owners, said that both establishments had found themselves in the same situation over the weekend.

“They prepared the orders, and the delivery man asked, ‘what’s your speciality?’ The restaurateurs said, ‘these are Israeli specialities,’ and the delivery man answered, ‘oh no, I don’t deliver to Jews,’ and canceled the delivery,” Nisand told the French news agency AFP on Monday.

Nisand lodged a complaint with the local police on Sunday against the delivery men, as well as Deliveroo, the delivery company which assigned the orders. Both the Consistoire Israelite of the Bas-Rhin region — which represents the area’s Jewish community — and the French antisemitism monitoring organization BNVCA added their names to the complaint.

“The Israelite Consistory of Bas-Rhin considers it intolerable that delivery men working for the company Deliveroo dare to openly practice antisemitic discrimination”, Maurice Dahan, the president of the organization, said in a statement.

On Monday, Deliveroo said it had launched an internal investigation into the charges of antisemitism.

“We take this incident very seriously and immediately decided to conduct our own internal investigation to clarify the circumstances”, the company said in a statement.  “If the facts as reported are proven, we will act and definitively terminate the contract of the responsible delivery man.”

Deliveroo added that it has “no tolerance for antisemitic words or actions, which constitute a criminal offense, and condemns any such act in the strongest possible terms.”